"A girl was never ruined by books," my mother used to say. I've spent most of my life trying to prove that wrong.

Sunday, August 25, 2019

The Overstory and Changing Minds

Finished Richard Powers' The Overstory last night and then went on to read Caleb Crain's  review of Ted Chiang's new fiction in The New York Review of Books.

Hmmm, I thought,  The Overstory is certainly a big, sprawling novel with a lot of story, but at its heart are ideas.  Is this good or bad? 

Powers has said that he read more than 120 books to research the novel.  He told The Guardian: "I wanted to tell a story about ordinary people who, for whatever reason, have that realisation about the irreversible destruction that’s happening right now and who get radicalised as a result. The book explores that question of how far is too far when it comes to defending this place, the only place we have to make a home. The act of writing this book has made me more radicalised, for sure."

And he says several times in the book that the only way to change someone's mind is tell a story.

Does he succeed?  Will anyone who is not already convinced that the world is in dire straits read it, let alone be changed by the book? 

I doubt it, although I give him A for Effort.  The many intertwined histories that he portrays can be absorbing, and I found myself nodding, yes, I've read about this.  But I can't see a climate change denier picking it up, out of the blue, and letting himself/herself be carried along to the conclusions that all the characters come to.

That said, I have three other criticisms.  The first is that a selected bibliography would be great: I found myself thinking of references he must have read, but I would like to know more about the formal foundation for his characters. 

Secondly, he only mentions in passing the fact that forests have been under siege for thousands of years.  People have cut them down for all sorts of reasons, but one underlying ones is that savannas are what anatomically modern human evolved in, and where we feel most at home--a few trees are great, but grass is what we like. (I write a lot about that in two of my books: Road Through Time: The Story of Humanity on the Move and Green City: People, Nature,  Urban Life)  While forests are wonderful, interconnected things, any battle to protect them must take that into account.

Thirdly, there is little mention of children or mothers in the book.  Powers says he has chosen not to have kids, which is in many respects a principled choice.  But for ordinary folks, making sure there is a world worth living in for future generations is a primary motivation for environmental action.  The female characters in the book either have no desire to have children or can't, and the mothers of all characters are largely absent (three of them a either silly, literally demented, or mentally unstable.) Perhaps the novel would be twice as long if Powers included their stories, but judicious trimming might have made room for them, thus adding another level to the novel's punch.

Saturday, August 17, 2019

A Rare Case of a French Translation Being Better than the English Origianl

Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls is one of the rare books that I think is better in French translation than in the English original. One of my library groups--a francophone one--chose it for the schedule this year, and we'll be discussing it in early September. I'd read it before in English (or so I thought) but that was long so I decided to start the translation--Pour qui sonne le glas--well in advance, since I read more slowly in French than in English.

The story, if you've forgotten, tells of Robert Jordan, an American member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting fascist Loyalist forces in the 1930s. He's a Spanish professor from Montana, so he's fluent in the language and somewhere he's picked up knowledge about how to make bombs. His task is to blow up a bridge during an attack by Republican forces, so the Loyalist ones will be trapped and wiped out.

Easier said than done: he works with a group of guerilla fighters, who have various talents and experiences. A beautiful 19 year old girl who'd been raped repeatedly by the Loyalist is among them. She's been traumatized but nevertheless they fall in love and have three days together before almost everything ends badly.

Hemingway writes powerfully and very clearly about what this sort of war is like: I was reminded of Tim O'Brien's masterful fictions from the Vietnam War. Much ugliness is there, with few heroes and a great deal of lies. Anyone who knows Hemingway's own story can also read many hints of exactly how his own drama will end.

But Hemingway has chosen to directly "translate" the Spanish spoken by Jordan and his partisans into English, particularly at the beginning. When the friends or lovers address each other they frequently use the "Thou," the second person singular form which hasn't been used in English for a couple of hundred years. The result is either comic, awkward, or read from this distance, a shocking case of condescending appropriation of voice. A reader of the original in 2019 might well be tempted to throw the book aside after a few chapters.

However in French, the second person singular is used all the time among friends, family and lovers, so that infelicity falls away because addressing someone as "tu" is commonplace. The story shines through, and it is worth reading.

My advice to readers of the original: grit your (proper second person plural, you'll notice) and carry on. Although I must note that apparently when I'd read the novel at about age 19 I only read the steamy love scenes: there was much that was new to me.

Friday, August 2, 2019

When Fiction Nails It Better Than Non-Fiction

Just finished Anna Burn's devastating Milkman. The Mann Booker prize winning novel takes place in an un-named city (obviously Belfast) in the 1970s when violence and inter-community hate was pathologically universal.

After reading it, how could anyone want a Brexit without a "soft border" with Northern Ireland? (Or any sort of Brexit, in fact.) But maybe there is hope because the Bojo's Conservatives' majority is now reduced to one.